Major Impact

AMY ENGELHARDT IS A VERY FUNNY PERSON. I hesitate to label her a comedian, although comedy seems to bubble from the soul of her being. But she’s also an excellent singer, as deft at ensemble singing as she is putting across a solo song. And that song may well be one of her own, because she’s an extremely skilled songwriter as well, whose solo recording “Not Gonna Be Pretty” is an amazing distillation of her talents. She also writes prose with the deft hand of one who lives comfortably among words.

Amy Engelhardt

So I should call her a comedian, because it’s the funny people who are most adept at being serious. They understand how irony works; they play with sounds and language to underscore serious points. And Engelhardt brings this all together in “Impact,” which I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s an intense hour of songs and words with Amy front and center telling a story she needed to tell. That it celebrates – in only most moderately joyful sense of the term – the tragedy of the airplane disaster in Lockerbie, Scotland, in a labyrinthine journey of heartbreak and grief, without lapsing into the maudlin or making a cheap sale of the heart-warming finish, is a testament to Engelhardt’s many skills, all brought together in a piece speaks to all of us who have been anywhere near a tragedy. In other words, all of us.

She establishes three things at the outset of her show: First, that’s she’s a Syracuse University grad; second, that she grew up in New Jersey; and third, that the story to follow will celebrate “thin moments.” Let’s take the last one first. Thin moments, she explained, are those moments in which you feel an uncanny resonance between whatever it is you’re up to and something related, portentous, and less-defined. It’s not déjà vu, although there’s some overlap, and it’s not the phenomenon of “thin places,” another Celtic term, but this one describing a resonant location.

“Need a sign? See one./Need a hand? Be one./Follow every clue./Something's callin' you,” she sings in the show’s opening number, “True.” Engelhardt accompanies herself on keyboard, with excellent support from cellist Harriet Davidson and drummer Tom Bancroft, performers who straddle many different categories of music.

Growing up in New Jersey gives you a tremendous reliance upon empirical evidence to establish the credibility of anything. Jerseyites are born cynics. Engelhardt takes pride in that quality, and yet the experience she shares is revealed as a succession of thin moments, possibly unexplainable to a Newark-based bystander.

Graduating from Syracuse University when she did put her in the position of knowing, or at least knowing of, many of the students killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, at the end of 1988. “Impact” begins with a message Engelhardt shared with some friends in 2019, revealing her plan to visit Lockerbie during a work-visit to the UK. A succession of stories unrolls in an interconnected tapestry. Although it’s not a two-dimensional experience: we’ve got at least four of those pesky dimensions at work here.

There’s the time factor, of course. 270 deaths were recorded, achieved in such a cold-blooded manner that the story didn’t leave the front pages for a very long time. Added to that was the time it took for people on the periphery of the event, people like Amy, forced to process the heartache of the loss of friends. Which spun, for her, into the subsequent time, as she pursued a career path those friends no longer could follow.

There’s the dimensionality of space, of a field in Lockerbie where fuselage and body parts were strewn, where a local woman named Josephine Donaldson found a handbag that contained cards celebrating Nicole Boulanger’s 21st birthday. Nicole was a friend of Amy, so we add time and find Engelhardt meeting Donaldson in 2019, absorbing her story and its resonance with Boulanger.

Tom Bancroft, Harriet Davidson, and
Amy Engelhardt. Photo by Alex Stein.

There’s a two-dimensional page, of the New York Daily News, picturing Nicole’s mother at the moment of learning about her daughter’s death, firing what would become the chain of associations sending Engelhardt to the crash site. There’s another page, this one of a book titled “Good Omens,” written by Terry Pratchett and Amy’s friend Neil Gaiman, subsequently turned into an Amazon Prime series – leading to a job for Engelhardt when she desperately needed one. The job was to promote the series while dressed as a nun, leading a coven of costumed nuns in song. A job that sent her to various cities, including London in 2019. A good omen indeed!

What I’m mentioning are merely elements of a far more robust story, told with pictures and video and, of course, song. But the center of it is Amy Engelhardt, who puts her tremendous storytelling talent to its best use in this performance, acted by her with the ease of one so familiar with the tools of comedy that she merely absorbs them into the narrative. It’s not a comedy, but it’s not without some laughs – sometimes laughs with a bitter edge. It’s a shocking, absorbing hour-long show skillfully directed by Kira Simring, who here suffers the fate of the excellent director insofar as we can’t tell who’s responsible for which element of the piece.

One of the emotional by-products of the Lockerbie tragedy was anger, tremendous anger both at the zealots who perpetrated it and at the cruel randomness of a fate that would choose this particular group of people to destroy so horribly. Yet anger never enters into “Impact.” Instead, and absolutely correctly, Engelhardt calls for kindness, the only salve, the only cure.

Nicole’s handbag was found, but not any evidence of her body. Amy celebrates her friend – and Josephine, who found the handbag, with a song titled “The Girl in the Garden.” Here’s a brief portion:

There’s a girl in the garden.
My unexpected guest
There’s a girl in the garden.
Looking to the west
She’s 21 forever, and forever homeward bound
The girl in the garden,
One of 13 they never found.

It’s a wrenching moment in the show, offering a thought, an image, that nobody would volunteer to imagine. Yet it conveys its story with a straight-to-the-heart power that only well-crafted songs can evoke. And that’s what this “Impact” is all about. It plays at the Edinburgh Fringe through August 28.

Impact
Written and performed by Amy Engelhardt
Directed by Kira Simring
The Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh Fringe, August 7